Michael
The First Heaven: The Veil
The first heaven was always the hardest to leave.
Not because it held him -- nothing in creation held Michael anywhere he chose not to remain. It was harder to leave because the first heaven was where the honest work of thousands of angels happened.
The ordinary, endless, sacred work: rainfall steered three degrees west over a widow's field.
A tide held back long enough for a boat to clear a sandbar it didn't know was there. A wind rerouted -- one adjustment, made at altitude by hands that had been making these adjustments since time immemorial.
The attending angels moved through the cloud-sea below with the brisk economy of surgeons in a ward they'd built themselves, each one carrying the deep quiet of those who understood that the small thing, done with complete attention, was the work.
There was nothing else. There had never been any other thought other than the simple satisfaction of doing a good deed without any thoughts of returns.
He had built this floor on that understanding and He was proud of it.
He took the illusory staircase to continue walking even though he could've teleported. It was these simple nuances that Father loved about humans. No shortcuts but just the journey.
. . .
The Second Heaven: The Bound Silence
It was colder here. The cold of stone that had never been quarried -- stone that had simply always been in one piece.
The corridors here ran without end in directions that corresponded to no cartography he had ever drawn.
The bound dwelt in the blue silence and the blue silence dwelt within them.
Michael walked through without looking, his footsteps absorbed into the quiet the moment they occurred, the sound of him swallowed the way all sounds were swallowed here.
He had looked at the sinners, once. That was enough. He did not want to linger here more than necessary. Father knows what the Overseers find in this gloom. He let the gloomy silence pass through him as he trekked upwards again.
Some things passed through you and left weight behind instead of memory -- weight you redistributed across every year that followed, so gradually you stopped feeling it as weight at all and simply accepted it as the shape of yourself.
. . .
The Third Heaven: The Furnace
The heat reached him before the light did.
Then the light arrived and the heat was irrelevant by comparison. It was not warmth -- it was a manufactorum, a factory in other words.
Light was a continuous industrial element here, something being made here in quantities the mind did not reach for, because minds that reached for those quantities did not come back the same shape they'd left.
The manna fields spread below the walkway in impossible rows: radiance pressed into substance, illumination given weight and nutritive value, the celestial host fed on light the way wheat was fed on rain.
An angel worked each row with the quiet patience of something that had been doing this since before industry had a concept.
None of them looked up. They knew his step well enough to know it's the firstborn.
. . .
The Fourth Heaven: The Citadel
A city rose around him in its full regal splendor. It was magnificience incarnate.
The New Jerusalem -- the architectural fact of it, towers of crystallised prayer, colonnades raised by generations of adoration laid stone by stone into permanence.
The great Temple at the centre blazed with fire that had been burning since the first sacrifice and would burn until the last, and the sound of it was thirty choirs in multiple languages performed at once, the sum of which was not music but the noise meaning itself made when it achieved critical mass.
He crossed the plaza without breaking stride. The angels parted before him and closed behind him, seamless, a tide adjusting to a stone.
. . .
The Fifth Heaven: The Host
Ten thousand in formation and the formation had not broken in the entire span of his absence.
The warrior-choir -- the avenging hands of a God whose hands were stilled, still present entirely in the posture of what they had been made to do.
They stood at attention as he passed. None of them spoke and the weight of that collective silence was not absence.
It was readiness, held at the exact pitch of a blade kept sharp for a war that had not yet declared itself.
He felt it drape across his back like a cloak -- the compound of pride, grief and the long flat ache of command in peacetime.
Which was its own war, conducted daily, in the time between the last order and the next one.
. . .
The Sixth Heaven: The Observatory
The stars from inside.
Vast charts of deep space rendered luminous by the act of being studied -- not the red murk of the lower territories, not the sourceless warmth of the garden below the Negev, but the clean black of space given beauty by the attention paid to it across uncounted years by minds large enough to hold whole histories in a single gaze.
The angelic-scholars moved between the charts with the patience of people who understood that history was a process rather than an event, that you watched it the way you watched a river -- present, always moving, always with the river.
One of them turned as Michael passed, their eyes held the look of someone who had been reading the same book for a thousand years and had, at this moment, arrived at the page where the whole of it converged.
He nodded once before departing. His pace instead of slowing down, picked up.
. . .
The Seventh Heaven: Araboth
The Throne was present in the way someone's absence could be felt.
It occupied the room not with warmth but with gravity -- the gravity of a thing that had been... that was expected to return, around which the entire architecture of the seventh heaven had been arranged.
It would remain arranged, indefinitely, regardless of whether the arrangement was ever again required.
Michael had spent every year of the silence learning to stand before it, he was still learning.
He suspected he would be learning until the end of things, at which point the question would resolve itself one way or another.
Time will decide if the learning would either conclude or become retrospective, and either outcome struck him as acceptable.
Beyond the Throne, the garden of the seventh heaven.
Not the garden below the Negev — not the ground the Wall had been inscribed in. This garden was modelled after that particular garden, the shape the word itself had been made to reach for before it was applied to any specific patch of earth.
Those mortals think in their scriptures that this Garden is the first garden...Irony how Father modelled this after that one.
The trees here bloomed in light rather than photosynthesis, bearing fruit that predated the concept of hunger.
The river running through it had no identifiable source, and Michael had decided, across many years of residence beside it, that this was very likely the point.
She stood at the edge of the still water with her hands folded and her face turned toward the surface.
She was so entirely herself that the sight of her, as always, reorganised the air around him before he had time to prepare for it.
Her hair was gold the way an old illuminated manuscript was gold -- not decorative, luminous, lit from some interior source that had been burning since before there had been a name for it.
Her eyes when she turned held the blue of the fourth heaven at the hour the thirty choirs achieved their one combined note.
She was, by any measure that had ever been applied to the concept, the most beautiful thing in existence -- a fact she was entirely, genuinely, structurally unaware of.
In the way that only things which had never needed to consider themselves from the outside could be unaware -- and Michael found this, as he had always found it, quietly devastating in a way he had never once attempted to articulate because some truths were better left unspoken than inviting vanity even if the chance is almost zero.
That way lies the fall.
She saw him, her mouth opened.
And she forgot what she'd been about to say...
"...Oh!" She recovered with the speed of someone whose mind ran faster than her expressions. "Oh, Michael -- you've come from downstairs."
Downstairs she says.
Seven heavens of layered creation between him and the mortal plane, and his sister called it downstairs.
Michael loved her with the full weight of everything that word implied, and said nothing, only feeling the warmth arrive in his chest before composure could intercept it.
"Gabriel..." he breathed in his usual serenity.
To be Continued...
(Author's Notes: Before the Disclaimer, A big Shoutout to @Kylar_Warp_Shinkai for your support to my novel and for being a loyal reader my friend. This chapter is specifically for you as a gift from me. For the golden tickets bestowed, I can think of no other gift than giving You the 7 Heavens in all their splendor.
With all that said, Folks we are delving more into the lore of the world, and have the angelic home of heaven shown for the first time. If you wanna know what the airheadedly pure Gabriel brings to us all, stay tuned for the next Chapter)
Manna: The food of Heaven that God gave to the humans after exodus for sustenance during the wilderness Wanderings.